


Landscape After Cruelty

by sternfleck



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Force Healing, Good Boy Kylo Ren, Hurt/Comfort, Kylux Positivity Week, Kylux Positivity Week 2020, M/M, Minor Injuries, Mysticism, Pre-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Snoke Being a Dick, Soft Kylux, but make it Dark Side
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:27:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24963013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sternfleck/pseuds/sternfleck
Summary: Hux is used to suffering under the wrath of powerful men. He’s not used to what comes after, in Ren’s arms.After the loss of an Order ship, Snoke punishes Hux using the Force. Snoke's apprentice picks up the pieces and shows Hux the softer side of what the Force can do.For Kylux Positivity Week 2.0, Day 3. Prompt: "Soft Kylux."
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 20
Kudos: 125
Collections: Kylux Positivity Week 2.0





	Landscape After Cruelty

**Author's Note:**

> Do I get a commemorative badge for my first Richard Siken title and epigraph? I’ve truly arrived in fandom now.

“We are the crossroads, my little outlaw,  
and this is the map of my heart, the landscape  
after cruelty which is, of course, a garden, which is  
a tenderness, a lover saying _hold me_  
_tight, it’s getting cold._ ”  
-Richard Siken, “Snow and Dirty Rain”

\- - -

  
The injury is tolerable. If Hux holds his shoulder perfectly still and makes his way down the hall in slow, gliding steps, he can almost ignore the torn muscles, the blistered skin. He can almost forget the uncanny chill of the Force, and the way it burned him like carbon ice. The floor of the holochamber, cold and bruising beneath his knees. And Leader Snoke’s voice, dull as a prophecy: _General, you will not fail me again._

Worse than this pain should be the regret over the Resistance attack. Hux’s grief is significant—his soldiers are his responsibility, and, apart from the human toll, a Lancer-class frigate lost is a blow to the Order’s ordnance and resources. His failure to protect this ship would have been hard enough to bear even without Snoke’s punishment. But Hux had known from the moment the frigate’s lines went silent that Snoke would have retribution ready to hand down to Hux like a live coal. By the time the call to the _Finalizer_ holochamber came through to the bridge, Hux was prepared for anything short of execution. As long as the Starkiller project is under Hux’s oversight, Leader Snoke needs him alive. 

Now, in the aftermath, Hux’s pain is doubled. There’s the shame of his failure, and, in addition, the physical agony of having his arm wrenched back and mangled with Force magic. As though Hux is nothing more than a worthless toy for the Supreme Leader to toss around as he pleases.

But that’s how it is with Force users, and men. Give a man enough power, and he’ll destroy anything that sparks his ire. Only Hux’s usefulness has preserved his life so far.

He’ll stay useful. He’ll return to the bridge. He always does, even after he’s been injured. When Snoke roughs him up with Force-gravity or that loathsome blue lightning, Hux keeps his chin up and shows his officers they can count on him to take the blame for any collective failures.

Hux leads by example. He doesn’t take out his rage on those below him. He simply recalibrates, always aiming higher. Aiming for the throne. One day, Snoke’s reign will end, and the Galaxy will be cleansed of Force users, Imperial holdovers, and Rebel scum. Hux will rule at the helm of a new Empire of order and stability.

His primary challenge is to stay alive long enough for his destiny to find him.

Footsteps, soft, behind him, crossing the durasteel floor. When Hux glances back, the hall is dark enough that at first, the hooded figure blends into the shadows. But then the man moves, and his helmet catches a gleam of light. Of course. Ren.

Day after day, Ren watches Hux. Even through the helmet, Hux can sense Ren’s eyes on him when he’s on the bridge. Unmasked, Ren’s dark eyes are watery and full of feeling, as though the man is constantly on the verge of tears. The vulnerability on his face hits Hux in the chest like a blaster bolt every time Ren takes off his helmet. It makes Hux want to be sick.

Ren was bare-faced a moment ago when he watched Snoke toss Hux down on the holochamber floor and wrench his arm back at an inhuman angle. Ren’s eyes welled up with disgusting fluid, but he didn’t stop watching Hux’s humiliation. He didn’t turn away. And Ren is still watching Hux now, padding along behind him in the hallway like a cur.

Lately, Hux has suffered from unsettling dreams that are most likely the result of Ren exerting his uncanny powers on Hux’s mind. In these dreams, Hux acts like a different person. He removes his uniform and lies on his back and whispers soft words he’d never say to anyone, especially not to Ren. If they’ve shared a few rough kisses up against bulkheads and in empty conference rooms, that means nothing. Less than nothing. But it’s just like Ren to think these acts of weakness could become something more.

Hux sends a silent wish for Ren to cease tormenting him with these perverse visions. He has enough suffering in his life without Ren projecting filth into his mind. Then he remembers Ren is a mind-reader, and has probably heard him. Good. Let him be chastened and ashamed of his vile, voyeuristic ways.

Ren walks faster, footsteps heavier. Catching up with Hux.

“You’re going to the bridge,” Ren says when he’s abreast of Hux. The vocoder makes his words sound like a final judgment. The sound of the grave itself.

Hux doesn’t answer, doesn’t even turn his head. The ragged little telepath can think what he wants of Hux’s plans. The bridge is where Hux belongs. They may be co-commanders by name, but no one on the _Finalizer_ has any illusions about Hux’s superior authority, not even Ren himself. 

“You can’t go to the bridge,” says Ren, as though his opinion could possibly matter to Hux in any way at all. “You’re hurt. You’re in pain.”

“It’s tolerable,” Hux snaps. “I can endure it.”

“ _I_ can barely endure it,” Ren counters. His voice is a growl. “In the Force. It’s agony.”

Hux picks up his pace, ignoring the pain in his shoulder in his haste to get clear of Ren. But Ren, in a whirl of black robes, reaches out and grabs Hux’s uninjured arm to stop him from walking away.

On instinct, Hux kicks out and twists Ren’s wrist in the way he’s learned to do in self-defence simulations. Ren lets go and, as Hux tries to calm himself and get control of the agony searing through him once more, Ren lowers his hand to his side. He clenches his gloved fingers in the skirt of his robes, then unclenches them. Nervous.

“I can help you.”

Hux scoffs. The puff of air expands his chest, which jostles his shoulder, which turns his scoff into a wince. He bites back a noise that would betray his pain.

“With the Force,” Ren elaborates.

Hux’s stomach goes cold, cold as the touch of Snoke’s burning Force-grip on his skin. “Absolutely not. Absolutely fucking not, not the Force, not now, not _ever_.” 

“I can’t heal you,” says Ren, as though Hux never spoke at all. “Healing belongs to the Light Side of the Force. But I can take your pain and transmute it to strengthen my power. You’ll feel relief. You’ll be able to sleep.”

Lovely. A poorly reformed Jedi who’s now offering to feed off of Hux’s pain, the way he feeds off the memories of the prisoners he interrogates. Was this what Ren was doing when he watched Snoke tear Hux’s arm out of its proper place? Was the wetness in Ren’s eyes a result of his Dark Side power level climbing to new heights?

Hux doesn’t ask any of these questions. Instead, making an effort to keep his voice from trembling with pain, he hisses, “Is your helmet resistant to blaster fire? Have you got armour under those robes? Is that why you’re bold enough to test me?”

Ren is silent, toeing stupidly at the floor with one great and filthy black boot. At last, he says, “You want to see?”

Even the vocoder can’t disguise Ren’s mischief, the bashful edge to his voice. For all his violence and his power, Ren is still barely more than a boy, thinking too often of ways to get close to Hux. The Galaxy hasn’t taught him yet that such alliances only end in yet another kind of punishing pain.

“I’m not making advances. The opposite. If you touch me with the kriffing Force, we’ll both find out whether your garb protects you. I’ll blast you so hard your loathsome Rebel parents will feel it halfway across the Galaxy. Now get away from me. You’re right. It hurts. It will heal on its own. I don’t need you making it worse.”

Suppressing another flinch from the effort of speaking, Hux turns away. He resumes his careful progress down the hallway, putting distance between himself and Ren.

Hux doesn’t look back. But Ren’s eyes are on him like the weight of his pain, like a rifle’s sight, like two dead stars laden with their own inexorable gravity.

-

The bridge is quiet. The officers avoid Hux’s eyes, as though they can save themselves from sharing his fate by carrying on with their daily habits. Hux’s voice shakes when he gives orders. He’s fooling no one, and the pain isn’t lessening with time. Though his arm is, to all appearances, intact, the nerves are firing wrong. His skin burns as though his arm has been immersed in trihexalon. His muscles weaken, aching like they’re being eaten away.

By the end of his shift, he’s on the verge of collapse. He manages to reach his quarters with the aid of a few propaganda lines from one of his recent ‘trooper speeches. Hux repeats them under his breath until he forgets his body and remembers only to move, to push onward.

Ren is waiting at his door. The horror of this fact hits Hux abstractly, through the throbbing haze of his shoulder and arm. Ren moves forward to meet him like a falling shadow. His pale face is expressionless beneath the hood of his robes. 

“You haven’t considered my offer.”

Hux swallows. The movement hurts. His eyes fall shut for a moment before he forces them wide to scan his retinae for entry.

“It won’t get better without attention. You don’t want to go to the medbay for this. They’ll dose you up. You won’t like that.”

Ren must know this from experience. Snoke drags him around every fortnight or so, as part of his alleged training. But whatever Ren’s familiarity with similar injuries, he’s hardly likely to be able to offer Hux any help with his. Most likely, he’ll harm Hux, like every other man has who has laid hands on Hux in his three decades of bitter survival.

This logic plays like a distant holoreel in Hux’s mind, words that cut in and out and finally cease to make sense at all. Hux’s fingers stumble over his door’s access code. The numbers swim in his vision, set spinning by another scalding rush of pain.

“Hux.” Ren’s hand on his lower back. Hux is too weak to pull away. “Here.”

The door slides open, no code required. The Force. Hux has the brief thought that he should perhaps be grateful Ren hasn’t been sneaking into his bedroom all this time, and he renews his nightly vow to sleep with his blaster on the pillow beside him. Then his knees go weak and he sinks against the frame of the door. The darkness of his quarters swirls into his head.

-

Hux wakes to dim light and a view of his bedchamber’s ceiling. The mattress under him makes everything hurt. Ren is still here, earnest-eyed at the edge of the bed, and the pain in his shoulder is still here too. Ren and pain, these twin terrible shadows pinning Hux between them.

“I didn’t do anything,” says Ren immediately, which makes Hux suspect that Ren, indeed, has done something to him. “You were unconscious for a minute. No more. Maybe two.”

Hux grimaces. Tries to speak, to tell Ren to leave him. No words come out.

“I’m not going to leave.” He lifts one of his hands, hovering it above Hux’s body. “Will you let me use the Force on you?”

Damn Ren and his telepathy. But Ren has laid his broad hand across Hux’s chest, ungloved, and the weight of it is good. Better than Hux wants to acknowledge to himself, since the hand belongs to a mind-reader.

“It won’t hurt you. It doesn’t have to hurt.”

What a statement. As if Hux hasn’t proven he can withstand pain. As if Ren, whose very presence gives Hux a pulsing headache, could ever soothe pain and not worsen it.

Hux braces himself for Ren’s worst. For more cold agony pouring down into his bones. To think the servants on Arkanis used to tell fairy stories where princes wove magic spells to save the men they loved. Magic is real, and it is no salvation. No, magic is terror. In that, it’s simply another weapon, like everything else.

“Whatever you’re going to do to me,” Hux manages to spit out, “it’s nothing I haven’t suffered before.”

Let Ren make no mistake: Armitage Hux is no stranger to suffering. Armitage Hux is not weak. Ren saw for himself how Hux endured Snoke’s punishment, as he’s done again and again. Snoke’s is an old routine common to many men, and familiar to Hux since his years with his father: brutality, recovery, a lull, then a repeat. There’s no reason for Ren to break protocol now and try to make a change.

Ren’s eyes are shining. His lips are red like a girl’s lips, but big, too big, like all of him. He leans over Hux and eclipses the light.

“You won’t suffer,” Ren murmurs, as if he’s raising a glinting misericorde for the coup de grâce.

He may as well be. This is what knights do for one another, knights and soldiers. Men made to know war and death and nothing else. The Supreme Leader wants Hux alive to finish his weapon, but Ren has no such incentive to keep Hux around. Ren would be better off without Hux’s rivalry and his rational objections to Ren’s mystic plans.

For the first time, Hux is afraid. Sickened, he meets Ren’s gaze with dignity, knowing Ren can feel the fear in his belly and hear his thoughts like a voice creeping into Ren’s ear, beneath all that shiny dark hair. If Ren means to kill him, Hux won’t plead for his life. He’d never be able to find the words to speak, the right words, the spell that could prove his worth and therefore save him.

Ren moves, except he doesn’t. He shifts, somehow, flickers like a glitch in a hologram. Then there’s something in Hux’s chest that wasn’t there before, pouring inside him from out of Ren’s fingers.

At first the Force Ren pours into Hux’s chest feels like more sick fear. Slowly, it changes into a great stillness. The space between heartbeats, the space between thoughts. The space between soil and sky where green things grow. Images fall into Hux’s mind and out of him again. The still water in the troughs of the waves on a misty ocean. The silence of space. The plasma winds streaming out of a star. 

It’s nothing like Snoke’s magic, and nothing like anything else Hux has lived through. Ren is warm, so present above him with his soft eyes full of concern and something like care. It should scare Hux worse than this agony, to see such feeling in another man’s eyes, in a Galaxy where love is weakness and power is the only law. But Hux’s agony is dimming under Ren’s power. The pain moves away from him like the lights of a departing spacecraft. His fear dims with it, and Ren’s gentleness fills him up in its place. 

The dull haze in his head sharpens into a strange lucidity. Strange, because Hux, lucid, shouldn’t be allowing this from Ren. But now that he’s immersed in the weight of this care, he couldn’t make himself choose to stop it. He gazes up at Ren, parts his lips, and breathes deeply for the first time since morning. Ren, his dark lashes flickering, closes his eyes.

Time dilates, or dissipates, or ceases to matter. Ren’s hand on Hux’s chest rises and falls with each breath. Hux is awake or asleep in a world without pain, a strange world where someone cares that he is safe and calm and alive. When Hux opens his eyes, Ren is there above him. When Hux closes his eyes, Ren’s presence is all around him, heavy inside him, warm as water. Warm as Ren’s lips have been on the rare and strange occasions when they’ve kissed.

Ren’s lips quirk. He can see Hux is thinking about kissing. But Hux, with Ren open to him like this, can see Ren’s thoughts, too. Ren liked kissing him. Ren wants to do it again, and more. To do whatever Hux will let him. Whatever will make Hux feel pleasure, not this pain.

Through the Force, without words or even images, Hux gives some kind of assent, and feels Ren understand. Ren lies down beside him, body long and shadow-dark against Hux’s dark sheets. His hair fans out over Hux’s pillow, and it smells like ashes and sweat, but also like a night garden in bloom, heavy with tropical flowers. Some lavish New Republic shampoo, Hux realises, and almost laughs.

Ren pulls him close, or Hux snuggles closer. Or else the Force mingling around them has pushed them together in a lawless act of gravity. Whatever the explanation, Hux’s face is buried in Ren’s chest, and Ren is holding him with both arms, hands on Hux’s back, nose in Hux’s hair. Kissing Hux, kissing his hair, like Hux is small and sweet and good and _worthy_ of this tenderness, this awful new mystery Ren has given him. 

Hux has never been worthy of much. He’s only ever tried to prove himself, and he’s failed too many times. He’s still young enough that on the balance scale of human worth, his potential outweighs his failures. But that won’t always be true. If Hux can’t prove his power and might and brilliant usefulness to the Galaxy, eventually, his time and his life will run out. The First Order has no place for foolishness or mediocrity.

So this can’t be real, this dream Ren has immersed him in. The Galaxy doesn’t have this feeling in it. Everything, especially the human heart, comes with caveats and conditions. The world of men reduces down to base incentives, to pain and its avoidance, and Hux has never wasted time wishing it were any other way. He’s never dreamt of strong hands and soft eyes, never hoped for a place in the cold dark of space where he could be loved and know beyond all doubt that he deserved it. 

Hux doubts, but his doubt doesn’t break the spell.

When Hux sleeps, Ren is there. When he wakes in the night, the lights in the room have dimmed to their scheduled darkness, and Ren is there still. Ren wakes too, and lowers his face to Hux’s in the dark. He can’t find Hux’s lips, so he kisses Hux’s nose instead, then his sharp cheek. When he does find Hux’s mouth, Ren’s kiss is chaste, and tastes of sleep.

The ship’s night goes on, deep and deeper, with time marked in slow kisses. Hours must have passed, but Hux is in no pain. Its absence is noticeable. There’s a frizzled, electrical sensation in its place, prickling through Hux’s muscles. Nerves, or the Force, or something else of Ren’s.

Hux waits for Ren to rise, to go. Ren will wipe his lips and take his leave, and his absence will restore Hux’s life to its sterile order. Hux wraps his arms around himself to remove the temptation of clinging to Ren’s warm chest. When this moment ends, Hux will let it pass gracefully, having never truly held onto it at all.

Ren doesn’t go, though. Ren stays.

His breath ruffles Hux’s hair, storm wind over deep water. Ren lets his power ebb and flow through Hux with all his emotions vivid inside it. Hux glimpses flashes of anger, protectiveness, a fierce attachment, all of it felt fully without shame. Ren acts as though he comes from some other Galaxy where passion is strength, not weakness. As though Ren could rule that dark uncharted Galaxy and take Hux with him to the throne.

He holds Hux tightly, like it makes sense. Like there’s no other choice. This must be faith, or fate, or another of those words Hux doesn’t believe in. Hux doubts, but doubting doesn’t change the fact of this, of Ren.

In the dark, Ren’s arms around Hux are heavy as a heart. Heavy as a crown.

**Author's Note:**

> And thus begins the gentlest Kylux timeline, which I trust will bear no resemblance to canon.
> 
> Follow me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/sternfleck)/[tumblr](https://sternfleck.tumblr.com/).


End file.
